Software Development Engineer – Backend / Platform

Sinclair Broadcast Group•Santa Monica, CA

16h•$160,000 - $200,000

About The Position

Tennis Channel is building a modern, scalable backend platform to power the next generation of our Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) experience across mobile, TV, and hybrid applications. As an SDE – Backend / Platform, you'll help build the core services behind live streaming, content management, personalization, analytics, and operational tooling that support millions of users across devices. In this role, you'll design, develop, and operate backend systems using modern cloud technologies, distributed systems, microservices, and large-scale data platforms. You'll work closely with mobile, product, data, and infrastructure teams to deliver reliable, high-performing services that power the Tennis Channel ecosystem. This is an opportunity to make a meaningful impact in a fast-paced environment where your work directly shapes the product experience. We're looking for engineers who are passionate about building scalable, maintainable software and have experience with backend platforms, cloud infrastructure, data systems, or media and streaming technologies. Experience in OTT, broadcasting, or entertainment is a plus.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience.
5+ years of professional backend / full-stack engineering experience (not internships).
Strong experience in one or more backend languages (e.g. Java, Kotlin, Go, Scala, Python, Node.js).
Solid understanding of building HTTP / gRPC / WebSocket APIs, API versioning, error handling, and pagination.
Experience with relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, MySQL) and/or NoSQL (e.g. DynamoDB, MongoDB, Redis) along with schema design, indexing, queries, and query optimization.
Familiarity with caching layers (Redis, Memcached), message queues / streaming (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Kinesis), and event-driven systems.
Experience with metrics, logging, tracing (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry).
Familiar with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing (unit, integration, contract tests), deployment strategies, and infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.).
Strong debugging, profiling, and performance optimization skills.
Excellent collaboration skills — you’ll be working across domains (mobile, video, data) in a small, cross-functional team

Nice To Haves

Experience in OTT, broadcasting, or entertainment is a plus.

Responsibilities

Design and implement backend services (microservices, REST / GraphQL APIs, event-driven systems) to power core features: content ingestion, metadata, user profiles, personalization, video metadata, recommendations, etc.
Build scalable, highly available systems that handle high throughput and low latency requirements (e.g. for live events, real-time analytics).
Work with media / video teams to integrate backend systems for streaming, transcoding, content delivery (CDN), metadata synchronization, DRM, ad insertion.
Define data models, database schemas, and caching strategies to support queries at scale.
Instrument services with monitoring, metrics, tracing, alerting, and health checks; own reliability and observability for your services.
Collaborate with mobile / front-end / hybrid app engineers to define API contracts, error modes, versioning, and graceful degradation.
Participate in system design, architectural decisions, and trade-off discussions.
Improve developer productivity via tooling, infrastructure automation, CI/CD, build pipelines, and shared libraries.
Diagnose and resolve production issues, perform root cause analysis, and drive improvements in performance, resilience, security, and cost optimization.
Stay current with state-of-the-art backend technologies, cloud architectures, distributed systems, database systems, caching, streaming, and big data pipelines.